The Pentagon's Closed Door

In office No. 2E800 on the Pentagon's select second-floor "E" ring, behind a VIP desk, sits a tall, somber man handsomely dressed in a conservative suit of dark blue. No general, no admiral, but a civilian, he has the imposing job of seeing that the story of national defense gets told fully and well--a duty of exquisite sensitivity. Against the strictures of national security he must nicely weigh the nation's right to know. He must assure that the enemy is steadily impressed with the facts of U.S. deterrent might. The man in this crucial job is Murray Snyder, 47, ex-reporter. His title: Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.

In the two years that he has held the job, pleasant, retiring Murray Snyder has quietly become one of the most contentious figures in Washington. The military men, contractors to the Department of Defense, and newsmen who deal with Snyder are close to unanimous in the opinion that he stands as a major obstacle in the way of sensible and constructive reporting of the U.S. defense posture. More than a year ago V. M. Newton Jr., managing editor of the Tampa Tribune and chairman of the Advancement of Freedom of Information Committee of Sigma Delta Chi, laid a bitter protest against "Pentagon secrecy" at Snyder's door. When Newton repeated Snyder's answer ("All legitimate news of the Pentagon is available to the press") to a group of Pentagon reporters, it generated "a long, loud and unanimous hoot of derision." Said Newton: "Not a single voice among working Washington correspondents was raised in support of Mr. Snyder."

The White House. The son of a Brooklyn coffee merchant, Murray Snyder worked his way up from sportswriter on the San Antonio Light to political reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. Invited to the White House by Presidential Press Secretary James Hagerty in 1953, Snyder put in four years as Hagerty's assistant. He has attempted to quiet some of his critics by saying that the public information policies he follows come straight from the White House.

At his Defense post, Snyder works long hours, most of them behind his closed office door. He rarely goes out, and newsmen rarely go in; many a Pentagon reporter has not talked to Murray Snyder in months. On the infrequent occasions when he talks to newsmen, there is usually a Snyder aide sitting by, auditing the interview. Newsmen, military officers and defense contracting industrialists go over, under and around him in their efforts to tell the U.S. defense story. All of this dismayed Congressman John E. Moss's Subcommittee on Government Information. A repeated witness before this and the House Armed Services Committee, Snyder has been accused of "capricious censorship" and of a tendency to suppress information not only for security con siderations but for reasons of "policy" and even of "timeliness."

Many an incident led to these charges. During the Lebanon crisis, Snyder withheld the news that the Atlantic Fleet had been placed on a four-hour alert--a fact exhaustively advertised by radio appeals to crewmen to report to their ships. When Convair announced last November that its intercontinental Atlas missile had for the first time gone the full route--6,325 miles--Snyder refused official acknowledgment until the next day. He forbade Dr. Hugh Dryden of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to announce the launch time of the Air Force's non-military lunar probe attempt last fall. Pictures of the Titan ICBM were not released by Defense until last October--seven months after the Martin Co., manufacturers of the missile, began conducting public tours of its Denver facility, including full-length looks at the Titan.

Gag & Control. The press was not alone in protesting such Snyder censorship. To Thomas G. Lanphier Jr., vice president of Convair and onetime special assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force (1949-50), the Defense Department's communications approach is "curiously negative both as to keeping the people of the U.S., who deserve to know and have the right to know, apprised as to what defense their tax dollars are buying, and equally important, keeping the Russians and our allies advised, on an intelligently calculated basis, of the power of the U.S. to defend itself."

Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy has been caught in some of the pulling and hauling around his assistant for public affairs. Last year Snyder got McElroy to sign an order that would have put control of the information sections of all three military services under Snyder's tightly held wing. When top officers roared their protest against this gag-and-control effort, the embarrassed Defense Secretary quickly rescinded it.

The course of the governmental communications man in the cold war lies somewhere between the total candor of peace and the blanket censorship of wartime.*Murray Snyder insists that the guidebook for this path is the handout (or even better, the general press conference), which leaves no room for journalistic enterprise, limits the depth and breadth of information on U.S. defense--for the U.S., its allies and the cold war enemy--to the imagination and enterprise of Murray Snyder. "The people have decided," he says, "that the people's way of doing things is to give everyone the same release at once."

*A blanket which Byron Price, wartime Director of Censorship, never found too suffocating.

Price sensibly and shrewdly found ways to keep the U.S. people informed without giving either aid or comfort to the enemy.

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